I’m here in Las Vegas at Pubcon getting ready for my sessions this afternoon. I’m speaking on Enterprise-level Bid Management with some very seasoned industry veterans. But before that I’m moderating a panel on Building in-house SEO teams. These are some of my favorite topics in search so I’m pretty geeked up. And, as always happens when I’m at Pubcon, I’m in the middle of annual planning. We just turned our second version of 2012 plan, which leaves us with one or two more rounds before budgets are approved. I wrote a piece on planning that was published on Search Engine Land two weeks ago. I have a feeling my next piece will be a recap of the two panels I’m on today. More to follow!
Planning, Pubcon, and Planning
November 8, 2011Back from SMX East …. and a Few Other Things
September 29, 2011I was at SMX East very briefly. I sandwiched in a 36-hour stint in The Big Apple in between a family mini-vacation in La Jolla (sweet!) and a trip to Chile to work with our development team down there – very nice place, Chile – never been there before. SMX was great as usual, as I got to catch up with some old friends as well as make some new ones. Shout out to Frank Grasso (new friend) and Mark Knowles (old friend) – we had a great time one evening at Ramblas tapas bar in the West Village.
I had the privilege of speaking on two panels with some really great folks, and I think the audience was pretty into it. They asked a lot of thoughtful and sophisticated questions. When I got back, I wrote a piece on Search Engine Land that recaps the two panels. As always I welcome any critique or criticism on these two topics – I always tell folks that I’m passionate about this stuff and I could go on and on for hours talking about it. Look me up, people!
Adopting Attribution Models in Big Companies
August 29, 2011I’m back to obsessing about attribution models and how they do and don’t get adopted by marketing organizations in big companies. I’ve spoken with folks who have had success in this regard – they are few and far between – and most of the success stories are from companies that are inherently data driven, where the math behind attribution plays a central role in their businesses. Think credit cards, financial services, insurance, etc.
As well, I’ve spoken with some of the providers – ad servers who do custom work around this stuff for large customers, and of course pure play attribution companies, and talked about some of the common challenges they all face in big orgs. Turns out the biggest challenges are not technical, they’re organizational.
The central theme here is the inherent tension between models that are sound (mathematically) and those that can be easily understood. As this plays out and evolves, stakeholders are less willing to buy into these attribution models and that’s where the process falls apart. More detail in my Search Engine Land column published today.
Links to Search Engine Land Posts
August 3, 2011I’ve been remiss in posting to this blog some of my latest attempts at contributing to the search world. In the past I would post my column content here after it had published on search engine land, plus give folks a little color. The good editors over at SEL reminded me that this was in violation of my signed agreement with them, so I stopped. So, instead, I guess it makes sense to point folks back to search engine land where you can read my stuff if you’d like (the SEO in me just died a little — sigh).
My last post, which came out two days ago, told the story of recent SEO success at Yahoo! Anyone who works at a large company can appreciate even a small dose of SEO success. This column looks at a few factors that together created a tipping point (thanks, Malcom) for SEO at Yahoo! in some of our largest and most visited sites. Turns out that is you have executive support and you’re able to work SEO requirements into the development process, then simply by creating clean URLs and eliminating duplicate content, you can double your SEO traffic! Who knew?
My Search Marketing New Year’s Resolutions, 2011 Edition
January 10, 2011Looking through some old material the other night, I came across a column I wrote in 2009 about my Search Marketing New Year’s Resolutions. Not surprisingly, like many New Year’s resolutions, some of them didn’t get accomplished. But enough of the world has changed since I inked that column two years ago that I thought it made sense to update it a la 2011. Here we go!
Resolution #1: I will integrate my SEO and social media marketing (SMM) strategies. Everyone’s doing it, or at least claiming they are. SEO and SMM teams working hand-in-hand, harmonizing messaging across facebook, twitter and the like, resonating with a singular voice, engaging users in a conversation that seamlessly unfolds on search results pages and social graphs across the internet. Easier for small sites and companies to accomplish, not so much for large, matrixed organizations with some of the worlds largest web properties. No problem, we already have ‘like’ and ‘tweet’ buttons all over the site, not to mention eighteen facebook pages and about a dozen or two twitter feeds. We should be able to get our hands around this in a matter of weeks – I’ll just start a Center of Excellence, include all the key players in search and social media around the company, and disseminate standards and best practices to all the stakeholders. Should be a snap, no?
Resolution #2: I will move away from last-ad attribution and use a real attribution management solution. This is the year. I mean it. I’m going to do it. But last-ad attribution was so easy to sell into the organization and for people to understand, and I really dread having to translate all that mathy goodness into Plain English for a bunch of high-level managers who probably don’t give a hoot which attribution method I use as long as I continue to increase my contribution to the bottom line. Besides, as a paid search guy, don’t I have the most (budget) to lose by leaving the warmth and comfort of last-ad? Maybe not, the experts are now saying. Maybe not…so how hard can it be? Negotiate a contract, liberally sprinkle some third-party javascript tags around my site, warehouse a bunch of data, run some spiffy predictive algorithms and away we go, right?
Resolution #3: I will devote more time to my adCenter account. Now that the Bing transition is complete in the US, all my Yahoo! search traffic is now coming in through my adCenter accounts. Thing is, adCenter works quite a bit differently than Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) did. I’m seeing traffic levels and CPCs change on my existing keywords, and I’m definitely seeing a different keyword mix driving my traffic than I did with YSM. I need to double check my international settings, expand my keyword list, restructure my accounts, write new creative, re-bid everything to match new CPCs and conversion rates, lift my budget caps…I better get started now!
Resolution #4: I will SEO my WordPress blog. This is getting embarrassing. I mean it’s like the cobbler’s children having no shoes over here. Some posts are tagged, some aren’t. None are categorized. And to be honest, I’m having a hard time with the basics – for example, writing titles that are both SEO-friendly and don’t make you puke in your mouth when you look at them. Yes indeed, it’s time to hunker down, put the headphones on, and sharpen my WordPress ninja skills so I can take advantage of all the SEO-friendliness the popular blogging platform offers. I think I’m still using the default (Kubrik) header with no add-ons except my own domain name. Disgraceful, truly disgraceful…
Resolution #5: I will take advantage of all the newest features and extensions available from the search advertising platforms. One of the nice things about the evolution of search marketing is that it isn’t just search marketing anymore. Display advertising, retargeting, click-to-call, landing page testing and automated bidding are just a few of the myriad new features now offered to the search marketer, direct from the search engines. I need to make a prioritized list of features right away, write up a testing schedule, integrate it with all my other priorities, evaluate results, roll out successful strategies across my entire programs – I could spend all year on this one.
Well, it looks like I have my work cut out for me this year, so I better get to it. See you next month. Until then, Happy Searching!
My 2010 Holiday Search Marketing Wishlist
December 14, 2010The end of the year always brings with it reflection of the good and the bad, the satisfaction of accomplishments and the yearning to do more. I got to thinking about all the great things the search marketing industry has given me, and all the things yet to come…..
Ah, the holiday season. Creative refreshes, keyword expansions, bidding up to capture all those credit card-wielding customers. As yet another action-packed holiday season descends upon us, while we light the menorah again and again, exchange gifts and happily hang delicate decorations on the tree, as we make lists and check them twice, I’m want to reflect on my own wishes for the industry I’ve grown to love over the past decade.
Here is my search marketing wishlist for the holidays this year:
Better SEM Planning Tools – I know, I know. SEM planning is tricky – inventory changes, markets shift, competition escalates, blah blah blah. While there are some crude public tools out there for planning, I wouldn’t want to take any of their data to the bank in Q4. Then again, perhaps the problem lies not in planning tools, but rather in planning cycles. The fact that right now I’m in the middle of the 2010 shopping season and I’m putting together a plan for the 2011 shopping season means that I’ll never get it right. I’ve written in the past (and talk all the time) about how to put processes in place to account for the inherent uncertainty of paid search, but let’s face it, in large companies there is a premium on certainty, a rare commodity in search marketing. Santa, baby, bring me some planning tools!
Actionable Attribution Management – I’ve spent a good deal of time writing about Attribution Management and the related challenges and opportunities. I still believe this is one of the Next Big Things for online marketers and I know that we, as an industry, will figure out how to make it work and integrate it into our marketing workflow. In the meantime, however, I will continue to shout about how we’re still in the dark on attribution management. We don’t even have a hint at the standards and conventions that will allow us to speak a common language when it comes to this up-and-coming marketing discipline, and until we do we’re pretty much just spinning our wheels. Come on, people – take the plunge and let’s get going!
Holiday Bidding Algorithms – Last year was the first holiday season where we used automated bidding algorithms on some of our in-house retail-focused paid search campaigns. Boy, was that ever exciting! We learned a lot about how to (and how not to) build an algorithm that could react to a rapidly-shifting market like Q4 retail, and I think we’re a lot better off this year as a result — but we’ll know much better in a couple of weeks. One of the keys we found, not surprisingly, is that a much shorter time horizon needs to be used in making bidding decisions in a rapidly shifting marketplace. Also, historical (year over year) data can come into play to help predict when marketplace shifts will happen. Above all, bidding automatons, make sure you have methods in place to measure the success of your bidding strategy.
More Bing Traffic – I love the quality of traffic I get in the new Unified Marketplace (Bing + Yahoo!, managed through adCenter). My feeling is that as advertisers get more adept at using adCenter, we’ll get better at optimizing the combined Bing and Yahoo traffic to get the most value out of the Unified Marketplace.
Standards, Standards, Standards – OK, we’ve been doing this search marketing thing for a while now, and we still don’t have any real standards in our industry. Am I the only one who is bothered by that? Big Ups to Google for their adwords certification program, but outside of that it’s still like the wild west out here. On the technical side of the house, the search engines give us API access but there is no formal training, nor is there a blueprint for success on how to use them. Every new large advertiser or tools provider has to reinvent the wheel to figure out how to execute on efficient API management. We could really use an open source or pre-defined set of standards or best practices on how to optimize API calls or data storage for different types of web server or firmware configurations. And what about the marketing side of the house? I’d love to have some consensus around benchmarks for metrics like CTR by position, conversion rates for different kinds of businesses, CTRs and CPCs for brand keywords, etc.
More Innovative Ad Products – I simply adore retargeting and behavioral targeting. But with the rapid ascent of search marketing over the past five or six years, the display advertising industry has taken a back seat, relatively speaking. The fact that inventory supply now generally exceeds advertiser demand hasn’t helped. And now that search marketing has matured so incredibly quickly and competition has reached feeding-frenzy levels, there is a renewed focus on display inventory and how to make it more valuable for advertisers. Ad networks and exchanges have pushed this evolution along by offering CPA and CPC buys, and it helps that more publishers are offering retargeting. So, what’s next? I’ve run into a few companies that are doing some super smart work around automating display optimization at the placement- and creative-level on specific networks. There’s lots of opportunity here, as efficiency makes a big difference. I think the next step will be taking such ideas and optimizing across networks, and soon, hopefully, across search and display.
That should just about cover everything I want this holiday season. Oh, and if somehow the San Diego Chargers can miraculously make the playoffs this year, that’d be just swell. Hey, a guy can wish, can’t he? Happy Holidays!
WebProNews Interview at PubCon Vegas 2010
November 17, 2010I caught up with Mike at WebProNews last week at PubCon. We talked about, among other things, what it’s like to go through the Search Alliance transition being both an advertiser and a publisher. The first take of the interview is here.
Next-level Optimization: Measuring Success
November 17, 2010Measuring the success of our optimization efforts turned out to be harder than any of us initially thought. It occurred to me that since my situation is anything but unique, it might make sense to write about it. Hopefully others have had similar experiences and we can raise awareness on this rather new topic…
You’ve made the case for advanced optimization, implemented loads of slick technology, and deployed across some or all of your paid search programs. Did you do the right thing? Did you make more money? If so, how much more?
To answer the question ‘did I make more money’ implies a baseline. Trouble is, you don’t really have one. What you’re really asking is ‘did I make more money than I would have otherwise’, and it’s hard to tell with paid search, because the market is inherently dynamic, as are the programs we manage in these markets. This makes benchmarking really tough, and scientific testing nearly impossible.
What you need here is a way to (somewhat) objectively measure success, a methodology not only that people can agree upon, but also one where execution is manageable. Let’s look at a few ideas that might work for you, starting from the simplest and moving toward the more complex:
Trending Success Metrics Over Time.
Look at trends in revenue, profit, ROI, whatever matters to you most from week to week, month to month, etc. Look at overall program performance before you started optimizing, and over time as optimization took over. You just might find out that ROI has increased steadily quarter over quarter, for instance. This approach is relatively easy, and works fine in a steady-state environment, but if you’re subject to seasonality or a shifting market it may not work for you. For example, your optimization efforts may look like a home run in a booming economy or a high season, and conversely you might be inclined to run back to your cube and update your resume if you’re trending results in a low season or a rough economy. What if this method doesn’t give you any conclusive results?
Comparing Paid Search to Your Overall Business
If seasonality or macroeconomic trends are clouding your view of campaign performance, try comparing your results to those of your business as a whole. This may give you the baseline you need, particularly if your paid search campaign is in a somewhat mature state. For example, if your company saw ten percent earnings growth and your SEM profit increased by twenty percent over the same period, you may be able to claim ten percent growth attributed to paid search. That’s not bad for a day’s work, assuming the lift in profit is more than you paid for optimization. But what if your paid search program is on a totally different trajectory than your overall business?
Cohort Analysis
If the first two methods don’t work for whatever reason, here’s another way to look at it. You probably have parts of your portfolio that are managed by automated algorithms, and portions that aren’t. Try looking at these parts separately to understand what happened. Select a cohort of keywords that was managed by each method, and analyze what happened over time. You’ll need to account for seasonality, so ideally look at year-over-year comparisons, or if you don’t have that long a timeline, try to normalize for the seasonality with historical data (try to figure out how much your paid search business as a whole changes with the season). Then, look at the performance of each cohort and compare. For example, if you’re managing through an economic downturn and you see a downward trend in cohort A, but cohort B shows a flat trend line, even though you’re not seeing growth in cohort B you may conclude that it’s doing better by comparison, and you can now quantify the ‘growth’ or ‘lift’.
As I hint at above, once you understand your lift or growth from advanced optimization, you will want to calculate your ROI on the optimization effort as a whole. Particularly if you’re in a big company, you should always be able to hold your projects up against any other effort your company could otherwise use the money to pursue. If you can show that you increased profit by a million dollars at, say, a fifty percent ROI, odds are good that your management will be asking you if you can do more optimization projects, thereby eliminating the need for you to rush back to your cube and update that resume.
Again, I think the key here is to find a method that you and your management can agree upon and a process that is manageable. And once you do, you’ll be well served to have the data and analyses in your hip pocket well before anyone comes asking for them.
Next-Level Optimization Part 2: Beyond Paid Search
October 19, 2010I had to wait on this one until our Q3 earnings release – otherwise it would have gone live yesterday. I’m getting more structure around my thoughts on Next-Level Optimization – here’s how it goes:
How do I know if my media mix is optimized?
If I had another dollar, in which channel would I spend it, and why?
Am I giving search marketing too much credit? Not enough credit?
At SMX East in New York last week there was quite a buzz about attribution management, which I though played right into my column for this month.
Last month we took a look at next-level optimization for paid search, identifying some ways to leverage targeting options and automated algorithms to ensure your paid search campaigns are well optimized. Now its time to take a look outside the friendly confines of paid search programs and see what it takes to up-level your optimization efforts by considering media other than paid search.
Don’t Panic, It’s Organic
First up is the most obvious media channel, paid search’s benevolent brother, organic search. A few months ago I took a look at a framework through which we could better understand the interaction between paid and organic search. In that post we tried to answer the specific question: If I rank #1 organically for my brand term, why should I be buying it through paid search? It turns out this approach applies beyond just brand terms. There are many ways in which your paid search campaigns can inform your SEO, and vice versa. As an example, we sometimes comb our referral logs for organic search keywords as a source of paid search keyword growth. Conversely, if we see a paid search term driving volume with solid performance, we may choose to build content around that keyword for SEO. Going back to our previous question, you can always test the effect on your SEO of buying a head keyword using the framework we built last time around – the most important thing to remember here is to try to use a common analytics platform on which to build your analyses. Remember that different platforms will often provide very divergent data points, and thus comparing data from disparate platforms will often provide useless if not misleading data.
One Step Beyond
Outside of paid and organic search, there is a whole sub-industry developing as we speak around attribution analysis and management, and media mix modeling. I wrote a column about it several months ago where we looked at a three-phased approach to attribution management. Companies are lining up to try to tackle these issues, but doing so requires a level of integration not easily achieved in the world in which I operate. There is a very fundamental issue that normally gets in the way of doing good work on this front, which is that most companies are unable to track all their media with a common technology platform. More and more websites are beginning to see the importance of this, are taking note and making changes, but with many large companies there is still a significant analytical void to be filled. The fact remains that in order to conduct meaningful analyses, you need good web analytics. By ‘good’ I mean that you should have a single source of truth for all media, built on solid technology (whether in-house or outsourced), with the ability to track all the way up to the impression level (this is normally not available with search, as the engines generally do not support third-party ad serving, but if you can get this at least for display advertising, you’re well ahead of the game).
Be Responsible
As I mentioned in my previous column on attribution management, there are three important phases: business intelligence, statistical modeling, and actionable outcomes. And while I do believe that as a marketer your responsibility is to fully engage in every phase of this process, as someone who has been in search marketing for more than a decade I don’t recommend doing any of this on your own. There are a handful of qualified companies specializing in this business and you can bet there will be many more popping up in the near future. But to pretend that as an above-average marketer you can effectively determine how to assign credit across media channels is absolutely irresponsible. It’s like giving me the keys to a Formula One racecar and saying ‘well, you have a driver’s license, you can figure it out’. Don’t do it. What you should do is research vendors in this space and spend your time making sure you can put the necessary pieces together to make a tight business case internally. Ask vendor candidates for case studies that show lift in profit, revenue, or other important metrics. Get your analytics in shape. Understand your own business better. Only then can you effectively put a plan into place that will drive business success through next-level optimization.
Sell, Sell, Sell
OK, so now you have everything set up for success. Your analytics platform is robust and unified. You’ve RFPed some vendors, made a business case for attribution management, maybe you even have a vendor selected and have a purchase order open. Congratulations! Now you have one more critical step to take, and its time to put your sales hat on. In one large company where I have worked, we developed a very sophisticated attribution model in which we had a high level of confidence. The problem we then faced was that we couldn’t effectively sell it around the organization. There were two main reasons for this. First, the complexity of the model made it difficult for people to understand – this is serious math, and frankly people aren’t going to get it. Second, and perhaps most significantly, attribution management means taking credit away from one channel and giving it to another. (The scary truth is that in most scenarios we will be taking credit away from search and moving it up the stack to other events such as display impressions or email). This literally means that search (or other) marketers stand to lose credit, and therefore budget, by engaging in next-level attribution management strategies. This will inevitably cause friction and impede your progress.
What’s a marketer to do? As far as selling the complexity of the attribution model, that’s one of the reasons you’ve outsourced the project. Place the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of the vendor – don’t bear this cross yourself. Call the engagement a ‘pilot’ if you need to – if it doesn’t work, you can always terminate the relationship, right? As far as the other question – the part where you’re stealing budget from other (or your own) channels, the way to overcome this is to have a higher-level ally or sponsor in your organization who sits on top of all the marketing channels. If you CMO or SVP believes that attribution management will benefit the company, that may be all the air cover you’ll need.
The path to next-level optimization through attribution management is a long and winding road. Take your time pre-selling the concepts to upper management, and focus on finding the right outsource partner. If you can do that, you’ll find that navigating this tricky path isn’t so tough after all.
Next-Level Optimization for Search: When And Why You Need It
September 20, 2010Interesting that this one is getting picked up by other blogs – not sure if it’s because of the content or because of the link to my column on Social Media. Or maybe just dumb luck …. Anyway this is my first attempt to put some structure around advanced optimization, a topic about which I am passionate and one in which I have been spending more and more time immersed. Here we go!
Used to be that you could optimize your site for search, buy some keywords, and reap the benefits of plentiful and profitable search traffic. Turns out those days are long gone. A couple months ago I wrote about how incredibly complex and nuanced SEM and SEO tactics had become, and how perhaps some of our time was better spent working on social media instead. You’ll be relieved to find out that I have since regained my senses and have decided to take a deeper look at some of the more advanced optimization tactics in search marketing, and how they apply to large, complex programs, like some of the ones we run here at Yahoo!.
For the purposes of this column, I’m going to assume that you’ve already covered the basics. That is, you’ve put some solid effort into your search marketing programs, to the point that your campaign performance has reached a plateau, and now you’re looking for ways to make the incremental improvements required to boost your returns. What you now need is next-level optimization.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
In order to take on an advanced optimization project, the first question to ask yourself is this: what business metric are you trying to optimize to? Is it CPA, revenue, ROI, or profit? You’ll need to have a clear vision of this before you get started. Hint: It’s going to be the metric that best supports your company’s goals. It’s also likely to change over time, but let’s start with what’s valuable today.
Stand in the Place Where You Are
Once you know what you’re going after, you’re going to need data, and lots of it. Make sure you have a good web analytics platform or other source of rich conversion and revenue data. Next, I believe you’ll want to start your optimization with your paid search program, because it offers both the most data and the most moving parts to be optimized. As well, I think that the same discipline and technique used in optimizing paid search campaigns will play well once we expand our scope to other types of media.
Hit Your Targets
One of the things that has drastically changed about paid search over time is the explosion of different targeting options available to advertisers. Targeting is a double-edged sword, however, because the more you use these options, the more data you suddenly have to analyze. Not a problem with small or medium-sized campaigns, but with large-scale programs this quickly creates data overload for the search marketer. Before we talk about that, let’s take a quick look at the major targeting options and some of their best practices in action:
Match Types: For high-volume keywords, add (and track) multiple match types. Don’t forget to use your keyword as an exact negative against your broad match version of the keyword to ensure proper traffic segmentation
Geo-Targets: Again, for high-volume words, use geo-targets to segment your traffic by locale – you’ll likely have local competitors in some markets, so you’ll need to address these markets differently than your nationwide campaigns
Network Targeting: Build out separate campaigns for search and content targeting. If you still have time, also segment syndicated and non-syndicated traffic. They perform differently and thus should be optimized separately
There are additional targeting tactics such as day- or week-parting and single-keyword ad groups and campaigns that can also help drive incremental goodness, but I’ll save these for another time
Now What?
Automation, that’s what. As I mentioned above, what you’ve likely done now is created a giant headache for yourself, the cause of which is the mountain of data you’ve just manufactured. What we face, and what most large advertisers face, is the need to build automation around paid search management. There are simply too many bits of data for humans to look at them all. But wait a minute – how do you automate optimization?
Look at Everything
If you’re really going after an automated optimized campaign, you’re going to have to go beyond the usual pieces of data search marketers look at – impressions clicks, conversions, etc. The reason is that search marketers actually think about much more data than this. Accordingly, you’ll want to incorporate additional data like bidding history, quality score, and competitive landscape data. If you’re going to rely on machines to make decisions, you need to inform them with types of data that human search marketers take into account when managing campaigns – when did I last bid (and how much), how is my quality score today (as apposed to last week), and what are my competitors doing right now? This means that you’ll need to build (or buy) the infrastructure necessary to capture all this data and aggregate it so it can be consumed, analyzed, and made actionable by bidding and/or management algorithms that are tuned to optimize to your target business metrics.
One Step at a Time
While there are some very good tools on the market for paid search management, most of them fall well short of end-to-end optimization. What this means is that you’re going to have to take a close look at the trade-offs in a build vs. buy world. If you choose to build (or perhaps even if you don’t), you’re going to need to prioritize your efforts very carefully. That’s OK, let the (pile of) data point you in the right direction! In other words, you’ll want to find automated solutions for either the most onerous or costly portions of your portfolio. You may want to develop solutions to automate control of your head keywords because this is the most cost-effective use of technology, for example. Conversely, you may want to start with the tail because you find it impossible to manage manually. Whatever your chosen course, take a measured approach so you can apply your learnings as you go. Believe me, I’ve managed many different kinds of paid search and no two programs are quite alike, so you’ll definitely get smarter the more work you do and the further you venture down the path.
Next time we’ll try to step out of our paid search silo and begin to look at how to think about optimizing search in the context of other media. Until then, Happy Searching!
